That was evident from the attendance at the company’s third annual Tizen developer conference at a San Francisco hotel this week. About 600 or so attendees showed up to watch Tuesday’s keynote, when Samsung Executive Vice President Jong Deok Choi showed off the first smartphone and smart TV powered by Tizen. Perhaps ten times that number showed up for the keynote at Apple’s developer conference the day before. And thousands more watched online.

Samsung is pushing the new operating system so it can control its own destiny. It sells more mobile devices than any other company, but today the vast majority run Google’s Android operating system, making it hard for Samsung to differentiate its devices among dozens of Android competitors.

Considering that there aren’t any Tizen smartphones on the market yet — the first one will launch in Russia in the third quarter — it was a testament to Samsung’s backing for the platform that had developers investigating the nascent operating system.

Microsoft sent a team from Skype to hear Samsung’s pitch, for instance, though none would comment about the company’s plans.

“Samsung is one of the largest companies out there,” said Benjamin Curley, Manager of Systems Operations for cloud phone service Line2, “You’ve gotta pay attention.”

Curley said he’s not yet sure if Line2 will develop its app for Tizen, but he was there with a colleague to investigate whether it would be easy to repurpose his company’s Android app for the new platform.

The problem for Tizen is chicken-egg. It needs developers to make great apps in order to entice consumers to buy devices, but developers aren’t inclined to devote energy to the platform until consumers start buying them.

Vidal Graupera, the Director of Engineering for Walmart Labs, which works on technology for the giant retailer, was enthusiastic in particular about Samsung’s Gear2 smartwatch running Tizen. But he thinks the operating system will have to go “mainstream” before many big companies would want to develop for it.

Choi, unveiling the prototype Tizen TV at the conference said: “For the first time in three years, today we can finally show multiple Tizen products on the market…read my lips, this will be on the market very soon.”